Best Contribution to Quality Award 2016

QApitol QA, a company that focus on making QA adoption easier forstart-ups was crowned the winner of the Best Contribution to Quality Award. They were voted by the AQuA community from an impressive shortlist of companies who provide fantastic services to app quality.

“I was so impressed by the enthusiasm from the AQuA community about QApitol QA, and for a young company they have made a great impression. I look forward to seeing what they can achieve next” Martin Wrigley, AQuA Executive Director

Thanks to all those who entered, find out more about the winner and the runners up below.

Appytest offers a set of ICT services for quality assurance (QA) in mobile applications. We guarantee the quality of applications for smartphones through consulting, testing and monitoring of mobile applications for both developers and integrators, as well as for companies using apps. Appytest also offers services to certify the accessibility of applications and compliance with the EU and Spanish regulations.

How can you use Appytest?

Labtest: We offer a labstest 100% web-platform (PaaS), multi-device and connected to more than 1.500 real devices to ensure compatibility and quality of your applications.

Consultancy: We offer our support for the preparation and definition of test plans included in QA (Quality Assurance) policies to develop apps.

Certification: We offer our expertise in a global service that includes our technical support, the preparation and test outsourcing, consultancy and finally our quality label for your application.

Why use the services of Appytest?

Improving the ratings of your apps, getting new users and more visibility in markets.

Ensuring that your apps use appropriately the resources of your mobile device.

Ensuring the performance of your application.

Ensuring your app’s usability and reliability from the user experience.

DMI is the world’s first end-to-end mobility company that combines all the skills and services necessary to deliver mobile enterprise solutions.

Our QA team is composed of testers with years of experience testing applications across multiple platforms and operating systems.

Our team has seen the growth of mobile applications since the time of Java apps to apps geared for the latest OS versions. We have not stopped growing, expanding, and adapting to changes in technology. We have grown together with technology, by having members attend trainings, online courses, and acquiring internationally recognized certifications. In addition, the team constantly adapts to new methodologies, processes, and learns from peers and other industry experts.

With a device lab that hosts hundreds of devices ranging from popular phones to the latest releases, the Testers are able to check applications on various platforms and scenarios. On top of that, we have incorporated the use of emulators as needed. We are also skilled at testing various scenarios against a variety of limitations, and manage to push through.

As an add-on, testing is no longer limited to app-side tests as our QA team is also able to perform tests against the server, performance tests, security tests, and so on. Topping it off with user experience and user interface testing. Yes, we believe in testing end-to-end.

As testament to our abilities, we have had notable client successes such as Warburtons app, London Heathrow, Addison Lee, Art Basel website and applications, Bacardi, Nokadi eWallet, Vegas, to name a few.

Infostretch is on the leading edge of mobile and IoT initiatives, helping businesses transform from QA to Quality Engineering (QE) for significant improvements in overall quality

Infostretch provides solutions, tools and services necessary for developing, testing and integrating future-ready, omni-channel technologies, connecting them with the enterprise systems that make them work, and enabling enterprises to rapidly launch quality initiatives faster, with less risk and greater success.

As experts in QE, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) methodologies and tools, Infostretch works closely with a wide range of leading global enterprises, helping them make a smooth transition to QE and achieve the utmost quality in their mobile development and testing.

Here are just a few of the many comments that customers have said about Infostretch and their contributions to mobile quality:

“Infostretch has pioneered all the aspects of providing excellent quality for our products. They have adapted our development environment to a custom Agile testing methodology that has allowed us to quickly build and market our products.” Pamela Thomas, Director of Digital Quality, Starwood Hotels & Resorts

“With customer experience being so critical to us at Vodafone, QA analysis and ensuring an error-free service is crucial. Infostretch, with their ample experience and expertise in this domain, have effectively ensured continuous quality improvements resulting in our customers having a seamless and enriching experience.” Dhananjay Nath, Marketing, Vodafone

A leading luxury auto maker provides an SDK to its mobile partners that want to offer safe access to their content and services to users while driving their cars. Infostretch provides all the test and QA services for these partner integrations, ensuring that all mobile services will work seamlessly in the vehicles. The company selected Infostretch “as a result of its deep experience in mobile QA” and its ability to work directly with so many of the mobile content partners in Silicon Valley.

Mobven is a fast-growth technology company operating on the mobile stage. Mobven leverages the know-how it acquires from its service business to build relevant products for the mobile market. Our latest products are designed to simplify mobile testing and were born from Mobven’s own needs. Without any satisfying product on the market, Mobven decided to develop its own solutions and make them available to third parties as a product. It comes under two brands: Capture & Momentum

Capture is focused on simplifying manual testing: it enables testing teams or closed alpha/beta teams to capture and report bugs easily with a seamless integration with PM tools (such as Jira, TSM). All the process of capturing the screen, describing the bug and adding environmental details are done with a few taps which translates in tremendous time saving both for test engineers and developers. Capture is the choice of Odeabank, a leading bank from Turkey. Odebank can now face UAT and client feedback in a much more serene way. It has cut bug processing time at least by half and that time can now be used for more productive and efficient tasks regarding the app development. It has also had a positive impact on morale, as the issues are clearly pointed out and quickly dealt with instead of being processed over and over.

Momentum is a tool to automate mobile testing. It is connected to Mobven’s test automation park which is controlled from a web panel and enables its users to pick any scenario to run on any device. It is also the first mobile to mobile (M2M) test automation tool that allows users to record test scenarios on a mobile device step by step and run this scenarios on multiple devices in parallel. Turkish Airlines decided to implement Momentum after considering enterprise-wide requirements. Turkish Airlines can now choose from dozens of mobile devices to run its test cases and scenarios without ever thinking about maintaining, servicing and replacing them. It also benefits from the extensive test script training program provided with the tool which is critical to leverage the tool at its best.

We have provided numerous clients with top quality mobile application testing projects, ensuring their excellent usability, consistency, and functionality.

There are estimated to be over 165,000 health-related apps for smart phones and tablets - it’s one of the fastest growing categories. In an assessment by the Department of Health, just one health app (for COPD) has been estimated to save each Clinical Commissioning Group as much as £200-300k per annum.

Health apps have the potential to revolutionise healthcare, but it is difficult for clinicians to determine which apps are safe and effective, or have confidence to use them as a treatment option or deploy amongst staff.

On the other side of the industry, app developers face the challenge of how to distinguish themselves from badly written or unreliable health apps. There are plenty of investors ready to fund digital healthcare (it attracted $4.2 billion in venture capital funding in 2014), but finding a pathway into healthcare organisations, particularly in the public sector, is a challenge. The lack of a standard quality assessment framework could stifle innovation in this area and result in some superb apps never coming to fruition.

Our Mobile Health’s vision is to reach a point where apps are used for prevention of ill health and management of chronic conditions; even be prescribed by health professionals. To achieve this, we have been working on a variety of projects to deliver quality in this area: we sit on the EU mHealth Working Group and are working with the National Information Board to create best practice standards and assessment frameworks for mHealth apps.

In addition, we also work with app developers, policy makers, investment communities, academics and healthcare organisations to build the necessary components of a vibrant successful ecosystem. We review apps for app developers, to provide valuable feedback and we provide curated app libraries for healthcare providers and organisations looking for apps to confidently promote and deploy to their community.

This award would be a real honour, not just as recognition of our efforts to establish quality in this field, but to help promote to app developers the availability of a quality framework in mhealth, thus continuing to encourage innovation in this area and confidence in the sector.

Entrepreneurship is incredibly hard, with no such thing as overnight success. With a grand vision to disrupt and solve real world problems, entrepreneurs are working hard and starting businesses with hope and passion.

Working alone or in small teams, uncertain, and with limited resources it sometimes gets tough in the journey leading to failures. While failure of the idea is justified, reasons related to execution, especially quality and customer experience related issues etc are not. While some entrepreneurs do not accept failures until they win, for many others it leads to lack of further motivation and eventual shutdowns.

While the ecosystem players - incubators, accelerators, investors help in accelerating/solving several challenges that lead to startup success, the reasons related to failures arising out of sub optimal quality of the products is not yet addressed. This is a challenge that needs to be solved, right away! Here is where QApitol QA scores - as the first entity trying to solve the QA challenges for mobile startups.

QApitol QA (QQA) is the World’s First Quality Accelerator for startups helping startups ship better apps, faster. We pioneered the concept of Minimum Viable Quality and have a vision to make Cost of quality affordable to startups.

At QQA, we created QA Acceleration program that aligns with different stages of a startup and its product evolution. The program helps startups test faster, wider, deeper, better, cheaper and provide them with actionable intel to iterate fast and reach market faster. We strive towards making QA adoption easier by Startups and we work closely with other ecosystem players like Accelerators, Venture Funds, Incubators, Work Space Providers, Influencers, Industry Bodies, and other players to foster QA Adoption and Innovation. While the large corporations find the startup segment unattractive due to the low revenue, we have created flexible engagement models that include combination of equity and fee so that adoption is easy. We have worked with more than 35 startups, helped them go to market with confidence by becoming the custodians of their app quality. Our commitment is to reduce the app failure rates that are attributable to Quality.

We have more than 15 years of solid experience in software testing. TestFort QA Lab has a proven reputation and a track record of more than 500 successful projects and satisfied clients, among whom are market players such as Distractify, Skype, and the Huffington Post.

The Huffington PostOne of the striking examples of the high quality standards which the company’s QA experts meet is the Huffington Post. We took part in load testing. The site has been featured on the main page of Yahoo several times. The Huffington Post lives perfectly with 200+ thousands of visitors per hour. According to Alexa, HuffPO is ranked 38 in the USA.

RebelMouseA social media aggregator for managing social media information and a flexible iOS application that allows constant presence in the stream of news and current events.

VMC provides a holistic approach to development, QA, localisation and customer care solutions. Our unrivalled expertise in testing and supporting mobile devices has made us a trusted partner for many of the world's leading consumer electronics and media and entertainment organisations.

We invest heavily in our mobile testing services, with one of the largest device inventories, a library of more than 700 to ensure our clients’ content is tested against both the latest and legacy devices. Externally we support initiatives on the leading edge of the mobile space, including the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), helping to define the certification program for future IOT standards.

Our dedication to quality is driven by our belief that great user experiences improve end-user satisfaction, which increases exploration and adoption of new products and technologies. We recognise that in order for the mobile industry to evolve and grow, quality is critical in every application released. This benefits everyone within the mobile ecosystem, including developers, services companies, and most importantly, end-users. VMC has a long standing commitment to pushing the Quality QA message to the wider mobile community through conferences, panels and thought leadership initiatives, standards bodies and supporting AQuA to ensure the fundamentals of mobile application testing are widely understood.

The value of our mobile services to the industry is underscored by the fact that the majority of our work is generated through repeat business with existing clients or from referrals recommending us to other mobile developers. As one of our clients, recently said, "Being a major OEM that releases 8-12 new devices annually, along with 2 years of OS support for our legacy devices, using VMC allows us to recommend 3rd party content to our users with the quality validation and assurance that our 1st party content is famous for"